Oddities From Then and Now

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Belle Gunness moved to Chicago from a poor family in Norway in 1881, when she was 22. Belle and her new husband Mads bought a candy store in 1896. It burned down after only a few months and they raked in the insurance money.

The young couple fostered a girl before having one of their own. Sadly, she only lived five months. Belle's next baby boy died too. Two more babies lived, but Belle, six feet tall and over 200 pounds, turned on her husband. She poisoned him on the day that his two life insurance policies overlapped.

Next, she married Peter Gunness, killing his baby daughter not long into the marriage. He too died of an "accident"—after scalding himself, he had knocked down a meat grinder onto his head. In reality, he had probably sought revenge for the death of his child.

Belle now had, in today's money, half a million dollars. She posted newspaper ads, luring in new boyfriends to die by poison and brute force, burying the bodies. She made sure to eliminate witnesses, even if they were her own children.

On April 28, 1908, the Gunness farmhouse went up in flames. Belle and her three remaining children were found dead, but Belle's corpse was headless. It might have been another woman, meaning Gunness lived out the rest of her life in hiding. She killed over 40 people. 

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On December 5, 1914, Earnest Shackleton set out with 14 men aboard the Endurance in an arctic transcontinental journey to cross the polar antarctic. 

Shackleton recruited sailors for his trip by posting an advertisement in the London paper. In the ad, he stated, 

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in the event of success." 

Shackleton got nearly 5,000 applications for the expedition, including three women who claimed they would be willing to "don masculine attire." 

It quickly became apparent to both Shackleton and his crew that the journey would be a long frustrating one. By December 22, the Endurance had hardly made any progress because of the pack ice. A year later, the grand expedition was abandoned, and the crew was forced to hunker down into the ship to prepare for a long, hard winter. The ice pack slowly crushed the ship, causing it to sink.

The crew gathered supplies and attempted to cross the ice, but noticed it was breaking up. Boarding lifeboats, they eventually encountered land after 500 days. When Shackleton and the crew returned home without having had any contact with civilization in several years, they were shocked to find World War I had broken out, and much of their Arctic journey was brushed over as the world focused on the war. 

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If someone in Ancient Greece wanted to descend into a truly magical world, there was perhaps no better drug than a psychedelic mushroom. Some scholars believe the Ancient Greeks used amanita muscaria mushrooms as part of their religious rituals. During many Greek religious traditions, including the Dionysian orgies and Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrants were known to have powerful visions and direct conversations with Gods. Although there isn't significant evidence that the Ancient Greeks incorporated the magic mushroom into their ceremonies, it's mostly because the ceremonies in general were shrouded in mystery. However, some Greek writers like the philosopher Porphyry described mushrooms as "sons of the gods" because they didn't spawn using seeds. 

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In 1993 the ancient mummy of a mysterious young woman, known as the Ukok Princess was discovered. 2,500 years old, she is believed to be from the Pazyryk people - a nomadic people described in the 5th century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus - and the colourful body artwork is seen as the best preserved and most elaborate ancient tattoos anywhere in the world. 

Buried around her were six horses, saddled and bridled, her spiritual escorts to the next world, and a symbol of her evident status, perhaps more likely a revered folk tale narrator, a healer or a holy woman than an ice princess.

The tattoos on the left shoulder of the 'princess'  show a fantastical mythological animal: a deer with a griffon's beak and a Capricorn's antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of griffons. The mouth of a spotted panther with a long tail is seen at the legs of a sheep. She also has a deer's head on her wrist, with big antlers. There is a drawing on the animal's body on a thumb on her left hand. 

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The unbroken seal on King Tut’s Tomb

The tomb of the boy-king was opened by the famous archaeologist and egyptologist Howard Carter in the early 20’s. The tomb had not been pillaged since ancient times, and contained treasure more spectacular than any previous discoveries. The story goes that he also found an ancient clay tablet in the antechamber. When he later translated it, the inscription read:

“Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.”

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The Scandinavian Goddess of Hel rules the underworld named after herself. Her plate is Hunger and her sliverwear is Famine. Her appearance is described as half-black and half-flesh colored, and as further having a gloomy, down-cast appearance.

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In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous mermaid like creatures, portrayed as seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

According to Hyginus, sirens were fated to live only until the mortals who heard their songs were able to pass by them. 

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The Voynich manuscript, described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”, is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript’s script and language remain unknown and unreadable.

Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre of historical cryptology.

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Vintage advertisement for cocaine

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The lake of fire appears, in both ancient Egyptian and Christian religion, as a place of after-death punishment of the wicked. The phrase is used in four verses of the Book of Revelation.

An image in the Papyrus of Ani (ca. 1250 BC), a version of the Book of the Dead, has been described as follows:

The scene shows four cynocephalous baboons sitting at the corners of a rectangular pool. On each side of this pool is a flaming brazier. The pool’s red colour indicates that it is filled with a fiery liquid, reminding one of the “Lake of Fire” frequently mentioned in the Book of the Dead.

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Stephen King outside his mansion in Bangor, Maine

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The five rivers of the realm of Hades, and their symbolic meanings, are Acheron (the river of sorrow, or woe), Cocytus (lamentation), Phlegethon (fire), Lethe (oblivion), and Styx (hate), the river upon which even the gods swore and in which Achilles was dipped to render him invincible. The Styx forms the boundary between the upper and lower worlds. 

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Keelhauling is a form of punishment once meted out to sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a line that looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side of the ship, and dragged under the ship's keel, either from one side of the ship to the other, or the length of the ship (from bow to stern). As the hull was usually covered in barnacles and other marine growth, if the offender was pulled quickly, keelhauling would typically result in serious cuts, loss of limbs and even decapitation. If the victim was dragged slowly, his weight might lower him sufficiently to miss the barnacles, but this method would frequently result in his drowning.

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The Maya believed that the world after death, also known as Xibalba (translated as “Place of Fright”), was a place of terror that had its own landscape, gods, and bloodthirsty predators. Interestingly, the Maya did not believe that it was truly possible to escape Xibalba, since mistakes and slip ups are part of human nature and thus completely unavoidable. Only those who died a violent death could truly avoid the Place of Terror.

In Mayan culture, the deceased were often buried with maize placed in their mouth, which served as nourishment for the soul’s difficult journey through the terrifying lands of Xibalba as well as a symbol of the soul’s rebirth. It’s not surprising that maize was the crop of choice in sustaining the soul through its otherworldly journey, since the Mayan diet consisted primarily of maize, squash, and beans. It’s believed that combined planting was common in ancient times, meaning that maize acted as a pole for the beans that twined around it, while the squash trailed along the ground in between.

In addition to maize, the mouth of the deceased was also often filled with one or more jade beads. Some believe that the jade beads were used as currency for the journey to Xibalba, while others argue that a single jade bead in the mouth of the deceased equaled an endless supply of maize.

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On May 12, 1625, Dijon executioner Simon Grandjean and his wife (who served as his assistant), were handed what should have been an easy if not heartbreaking assignment. After a dead child had been found in the woods wrapped in an unfortunately monogrammed blanket, a guilty verdict was passed on the baby’s 21-year-old mother, Helene Gillet. In spite of Helene’s insistence that not only was she innocent of the murder but that the baby had been conceived after the unwanted attentions of the family tutor, the sentence stood. Because of her family’s status—and in spite of the fact that her father had already disowned her—she was allowed an execution by beheading.

While Helene and her mother appealed to the courts, a rumor started to circulate that someone from the nearby Bernadine abbey had foreseen Helene’s death from old age and natural causes rather than on the executioner’s block, but still the law insisted she die.

Part of the responsibilities of the executioner is not to botch things up, and unfortunately for Grandjean, that is precisely what he did. His first swing of the sword clipped her shoulder and even more bizarrely, the second swing was deflected. In theory, tying back a woman’s hair should have given the executioner a clean shot at her neck, but the story says that it was the knot her hair was tied in that partially blocked the second swing.

By the time the second swing failed, the crowd had already been worked into a frenzy and was hurling anything they could at the platform. Grandjean retreated to a nearby chapel, while his wife grabbed the condemned and dragged her beneath the platform to shield her from the crowd and to finish the job with a pair of shears. The crowd was having none of it, though, and broke through the barricades to kill first Madame Grandjean, then to drag the executioner from his hiding spot and tear him to shreds, too.

Helene was patched up, and none of the wounds the Grandjeans had managed to inflict were life-threatening. That created a bit of a problem, as she was still considered guilty and Dijon rather suddenly had no executioner. She was ultimately pardoned by Henrietta Maria, the sister of Louis XIII, and was said to have spent the rest of her life in a convent.

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A brass nose attached to a pair of eyeglasses mounted to a metal loop that fit over the top of the head was a prosthesis for a mid-19th century syphilitic woman who lost her nose to the ravages of the disease.

A little over 300 years earlier, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the Dutch astronomer, lost his nose in a duel in 1566. As a result, he “wore a brass prosthesis” for the remainder of his days. Although it was noticeable up close, it covered a gap in the bridge of his nose.